It was a rare chance to apologize and take responsibility for past sins, when the paper was complicit in the lynching deaths of thousands of men and women.

Bro Krift, the paper’s executive editor, and Brian Lyman, its state government and politics reporter, published a series of articles and an editorial to apologize for the paper’s “callous indifference” toward the practice of lynching and the casual shrug it gave to the people who died.

Bro Krift and Brian Lyman

“I read through 20 years of stories and editorials on this stuff and there was always as sense of, yes, lynching is bad but we don’t want to do anything about it,” Lyman said. “If you look ahead to the paper’s coverage of the Montgomery bus boycott, it was amused cynicism, which was wholly inappropriate. When they had the Selma to Montgomery march, there was hostility directed toward the protesters. This paper didn’t wrap itself in glory when it came to covering these events right through the civil rights era.”

The opening of the memorial felt significant, not just for Montgomery and the county in which it was built, but for the south as a whole, especially in a changing world.

In the memorial, “you’re supposed to look at the past and understand where you came from and reconcile with those issues,” Krift said. “I didn’t exist in the 1860s, but the paper did. We were very much a part of it. If we were going to be asked that (question) within the memorial and museum, it only made sense for us to write the article that looked at our position, that looked at who we were as a paper and reflect on it and take responsibility for what occurred and how we proliferated the idea of white supremacy.”

In his research, Lyman was particularly haunted by the story of Robin White, a man lynched at the age of 27 in one of the few cases where white men were tried and convicted for his death, although all but one were later pardoned.

“When you’re reading through these lynching stories and confronting the transcripts, when you hear the lynchers’ words, they’re not even viewing their victims as human, they’re not expressing any regret for what they did,” Lyman said. “Robin White exists in the 1900 census and a few court records. There’s so much we don’t know, it screams to learn more. He was 27. He was married. He had a brother. His father, who was born into slavery, was still alive at the time he was murdered.”

When the museum opened, volunteers carried empty jars with the name of a person who’d been lynched written on the label. The jars were to be filled with soil from the county in which they were killed. One woman told Lyman she didn’t know anything about the man whose jar she was filling but she felt like his tombstone.

“That’s kind of how I feel about Robin White,” Lyman said.

It’s All Journalism producers Michael O’Connell and Amelia Brust talk to Bro Krift and Brian Lyman of the Montgomery Advertiser. Inspired by the opening of The National Memorial for Peace and Justice earlier this year, the newspaper examined its role in perpetuating racism and racial segregation during the Jim Crow era.

If journalism is a crucial component to a healthy, functional democracy, why do ad rates and subscriptions drive the size of newsrooms and the work journalists can produce?

Magda Konieczna

That’s a question that has stayed with Magda Konieczna from her days at the Guelph Mercury in Ontario through her career and into her classrooms at Temple University, where she’s an assistant professor in the Klein College of Media and Communication.

“What’s different about the organizations I’m studying is that they’re intentionally not for profit,” Konieczna said. “It’s in their DNA. They don’t have shareholders waiting for profit statements at the end of the year. They don’t have big corporations above them that are trying to produce a lot of profit. They’re more rooted in the idea of journalism as something essential for democracy and are built around that concern.”

There’s a story popular among journalist in Canada, she said: A group of men would get together every week to complain about their local newspaper. One day, these “grumpy guys” decided to each contribute $100 to see how far they’d get, creating and producing a newspaper that they felt better represented the needs and interest of their community, just outside Toronto.

The publication existed for about 18 months before it folded, but it left an impression. “Hearing that story and chatting about it with some of them 10 years later made me think about what other ways can we support journalism. The idea of the book was born during my time at the newsroom,” she said.

Now that her old paper is closed, there isn’t anyone covering the city council meetings she’d cover faithfully, Konieczna said. Her city is hardly alone, and while blogs and websites and weekly papers can help fill the void of daily newspapers, there are bound to be gaps.

Nonprofit journalism can help fill those holes in coverage, she said. Look at an organization like Pro Publica, a not-for-profit organization that started with grants and has earned a reputation for exceptional journalism due in part to collaborations with bigger operations like the New York Times Magazine.

“That’s a space where these news nonprofit models for journalism can really shine, these collaborations and co-published pieces,” she said. Some are smaller and more marginal, like the MinnPost in Minneapolis, which is “more of an online newspaper, publishing every day, publishing a mix of work, not doing as much sharing and collaboration (as other organizations). They’re more collaborative that the average commercial newsroom. They’re trying to operate and produce journalism without having that profit motive hanging over them.”

Magda Konieczna, an assistant professor at Temple University’s Klein College of Media and Communications, joins Michael O’Connell to discuss the importance of journalism to democracy and how nonprofit models could help fill the gaps in local news coverage left by diminishing newsrooms.

Lisa Khoury pursues a story about suicides among young Syrian refugees in Lebanon.

Lisa Khoury was determined to be an investigative reporter, even if that meant leaving behind a comfortable life and job to move to the other side of the world to make it happen. It would take more than eight months in Lebanon and nearly a year of calls and pitching before the Times of Israel picked up her story on young Syrian brides and the staggering rate of suicide among them.

In 2017, Khoury, a freelance journalist and producer from Buffalo, moved to a home her family owns in Lebanon, determined to find incredible stories the world would be eager to read.

“It was the most stressful experience of my life,” Khoury says now. “What I thought in my head was, I would go to Lebanon and I’d see all these things happening, all these injustices, things that would never fly in America. Of course an editor and a news outlet is going to want to run these stories.”

Her first day there, in April 2017, she went to purchase a SIM card for her phone. The clerk in the story was a 10-year-old Syrian boy. Inspiration struck and she went home, wrote up a pitch about child labor issues among Syrian refugees in Lebanon and emailed several outlets. No one was interested.

“That was the moment it hit me: this is going to be a lot harder than I thought,” said Khoury, who wouldn’t sell her first story until a few months later, a piece published by Vox on these young Syrian boys who were working to support their families instead of going to school and the emotional and psychological trauma they’d experienced but couldn’t deal with.

“The parents are in survival mode,” she said. “If the boys can work, they’re taken out of school and put into work.”

But as she researched that story, another question came to mind: If so many young boys were working, what happened to the girls?

Many girls, in their early to mid-teens, are married off as a way to help out the parents by providing them with a dowry they can spend to care for their other children. in addition, it’s a step up into a better life for their daughter, who can be taken care of by an older man with more financial stability.

But my point is this is not the life they chose. Each girl carries some type of trauma with her.

“It could be that the girl is married and everything’s OK, maybe she’s not beaten, maybe she’s not forced to have sex all the time,” Khoury said. “But my point is this is not the life they chose. Each girl carries some type of trauma with her.”

That became particularly evident during her second trip to a Syrian refugee camp several hours away from her home. She met a young girl willing to share her story.

An older man, in his early 50s, saw this girl and decided he wanted her. He contacted her parents, offered a $5,000 dowry, and a few months later, while the girl was doing dishes in her family apartment, a minister-type man came in, asked if she would accept this man as her husband, and she went into her room to change her clothes and be married.

When asked how she felt about this, about her marriage, the girl, 17 at the time and nursing her infant daughter, didn’t respond right away. Looking up from her notebook, Khoury saw the girl was crying. The man, her husband, told her father and brother that he was too old to have fathered the child. He told her father and brother that she cheated on him as soon as she confided that she was pregnant. Her father and brother beat her and her family disowned her.

“She gave birth alone … and is now stuck raising this child by herself. This man refuses to give her any money, to talk to her or to look at her. Her life as she knows it is over.”

Lisa Khoury, a freelance reporter/producer based in Buffalo, joined producer Michael O’Connell to recount her decision to move to Lebanon for eight months in search of an investigative story, the saga of Syrian child brides and the struggle to get their story published.

The only way to enjoy a successful, insightful project is to pick it up and move it to another city.

Andrea Wenzel, an assistant professor at Temple University and a fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, along with her collaborator Sam Ford, just won the research prize for professional relevance from the Association of Education in Journalism and Mass Communication for a follow-up paper they wrote about their work in Kentucky. There, they worked with the Ohio County Monitor to establish practices and habits that better engaged residents with their hyper local media outlets, finding ways to not only improve the information available to readers and listeners but to help media outlets better understand their audience.

“Trust in local news tends to be a little bit better than trust in national outlets, but there are other issues with trust in local news,” Wenzel said.

IAJ Producer Michael O’Connell welcomes Andrea Wenzel of Temple University to the studio.

Thanks to her position at Temple, Wenzel is setting her sights on Philadelphia and looking to incorporate a similar study in two communities there using an adaptive model of what was done in Kentucky.

The exact same methods and tactics can’t be picked up and transferred over, but “what does it look like if we take the process as portable and implement the process in Philly?” she asked.

Along with colleagues Anthony Nadler, Melissa Valle, Marc Lamont Hill and Letrell Crittenden, she has been looking at and working within two distinguished and dissimilar areas within the city: Germantown, “a historically African American community … with a history of negative media coverage and questions of stigmatized representation in media,” and Collegeville, a community in Montgomery County that’s mostly white and was nearly split down the middle in terms of voting in the 2016 presidential election. There, the question is about news deserts that result after the consolidation of local newspapers.

The questions driving her work this time: “What are local news needs and community information needs in these places? What ideas do residents have for strengthening their relationship with local media? What kinds of interventions can be used to make things better and to build trust?” she said.

There has been a research study and a workshop that spawned a few conversations with stakeholders to develop pilot programs that will begin in the fall. Wenzel has learned about different community organizations and active citizens who might not do what’s considered traditional journalism but who share information through a neighborhood Facebook page, a flier or newsletter of some kind, but they’re “not all synched up to each other.” Is there a way to get that information not only to residents but out to media outlets and help improve their coverage? Is it possible to then have reporters loop back with the community after a story is published and figure out what was correct, what was not quite on the mark and how that story can be the start of a relationship?

“Hopefully we’re going to tackle these things,” she said.

Andrea Wenzel, an assistant professor at Temple University and a fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, joins producer Michael O’Connell to provide an update on her award-winning work on researching community journalism needs in Kentucky and how her team is expanding its efforts in two areas of Philadelphia.

Every morning, around 9 a.m., there’s a conference call in the ABC newsroom. It only lasts about 20 minutes, but for Brad Mielke, it’s one of the most exciting and informative parts of the day.

“I always felt way smarter after this 20 minute call then after 20 minutes of hearing headline news,” said Mielke, host of ABC News’ Start Here podcast, which launched in March. “I was getting the headlines but also the observations from people who knew stuff, who knew more than anyone else about these topics.”

Brad Mielke is host of ABC News’ Start Here podcast.

A career-long radio broadcaster, Mielke found podcasting to be a very rewarding outlet that he dabbled in in his spare time, starting a few years ago. “It was eye opening to see how much more work it managed to be than a piece of broadcast radio I could pump out in a day.” He and his now-wife would “spend a week painstakingly crafting this podcast I was super proud of,” but it was a much different experience than his daily job, where he’d go into a booth, provide some information and maybe some analysis on a given topic and then go on to the next thing.

When ABC News wanted to start its podcast, Mielke was their choice from the beginning. He first expected this to be in addition to his regular duties, but it quickly became clear the podcast was to be his full-time gig.

While both radio and podcasting are audio formats, and both are trying to capture the ear and attention of a listener who is flooded with innumerable options, podcasting feeds a different audience.

“With podcasting, the difference is the hunger for someone to get beyond the headline and get a little bit of insight,” he said. “You already know what the headline is. The moment you wake up and look at your phone, you already know what the stories of the day are.”

Start Here is designed for listeners who are “hungry for getting that extra scoop, that extra nugget that’s going to make you smarter than your friends when you walk into the office or at least keep up with the conversation. As a listener, that’s what I enjoy, so that’s the type of questions I try to ask.”

And with more than 70 years of tapes at his disposal, along with the resources of a major international news outlet within reach, Mielke and his team worked for several months to develop and produce their sound and format to provide those extra details and go beyond the headline to provide context and analysis while still providing the news of the day.

“From the beginning, we wanted you to walk away with the headlines but also to give the listener the experience of being in the newsroom with us,” he said.

Brad Mielke, host of ABC News’ new podcast, Start Here, joins producer Michael O’Connell to discuss the months-long process of developing a program that utilizes the best resources of a trusted and well-established news organization to keep listeners informed with headlines and analysis in a slightly different way.

Lee Uehara had every intention of going back to Chicago and making the monthly Japanese and English newspaper she ran into a stronger, better publication.

After finishing up journalism school at Columbia, however, she landed an internship and then a job with the Associate Press, moving to North Carolina before coming back to New York City for a few years before going into teaching.

Lee Uehara

“I found I love to share information and teach. Combining journalism and publishing with education was a match made in heaven for me,” said Uehara, host of The House of Lee NYC podcast.

Her podcast is relatively new and she’s still working to establish the kind of consistency that will help reach more people and build her credibility, but it’s a simple, straightforward concept: “House of Lee NYC is where listeners can come on in and meet folks doing interesting things and get tips for resourceful living. A lot of podcasters seem to think they have to only interview famous people. For me, that is a risk I do not want. I believe there’s inherent worth in every single person and every single person has wisdom and tips to share, just from being on the planet.”

Uehara also runs a family events business, which involves sending out press releases. Given her journalism background, she’s surprised that she rarely gets follow-up calls to confirm information. That’s a symptom of “lazy journalism” she does not stand for.

In her podcast, she once interviewed a woman who had been an atheist before starting a small church in Brooklyn. In the course of their conversation, the guest mentioned that the idea of community is so important, even the astronauts were invested in it to the point where they asked for a table for their rocket.

“I called up NASA and it took me a while to follow the trail and maze to get confirmation that, yes, astronauts did request a table, but it was for the International Space Station,” not the rocket that would take them there, she says. To incorporate that small clarification, Uehara inserted a voiceover into the interview to set things clear.

Just because a podcast isn’t a traditional form of journalism doesn’t mean some of the basic standards of accuracy, fact-checking and being responsible for errors can fall by the wayside, she said.

Lee Uehara of The House of Lee NYC podcast joins producer Michael O’Connell this week to discuss the inherent wisdom that comes from walking around on the planet and living your life, the importance of picking up a phone to fact check and why journalistic standards are essential for podcasts.

In the greater scheme of things, getting the average person on the street to care about open government laws and the ability of journalists to have access to public records is daunting. It won’t put a roof over a person’s head or provide dinner for her family.

“Is it a hard case to make? Yes. But it’s a uniquely opportune time to make the case because the public is realizing the benefits of a transparent and open government,” said Frank LoMonte, a professor and the director of the Brechner Center for Freedom of Information at the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications.

Frank LoMonte

There are some very specific examples of things the general public does care about, and in fact knows about, due to public documents being provided to journalists. He points, specifically, to the ongoing water crisis in Flint, Michigan, and high-profile deaths involving police officers.

“When we see people dying at the hands of police, obviously the first concern is to stop that from happening,” LoMonte said. “Why is it that we know there are Chicago police officers that covered up and lied about the shooting of Laquan McDonald, who put forth a false narrative about him threatening them with a knife? Because a journalist spent 11 months in court fighting to get ahold of the video the police persistently dug in and tried to withhold.”

The Brechner Center is a think tank and policy research organization identifies and tries to work in a collaborative manner with a broad group of interested parties to identify and address persistent legal issues facing journalists who don’t have the legal support of the New York Times or Washington Post.

“The first thing we published was about access to information from police agencies in the event of officer-involved shootings. That seemed a very timely and urgent project, and it was actually brought to us from the sheriff’s office in Seattle, Washington. They were concerned, frankly, that they had not always done the best job in keeping the public informed and giving out the most accurate information in the event that an officer was involved in a high-profile shooting and they wanted to do better,” he said.

Once a litigator, LoMonte says the Brechner Center doesn’t file lawsuits directly but will file briefs in support of a case where it makes sense to do so.

“In my years of doing this work, I’ve become increasingly convinced you can’t sue your way to success,” he said. “I’ve worked on the opposing side with government agencies that will lose a lawsuit and will turn right around the next day and go back to the old ways as if nothing happened because it’s not their money.”

Lawsuits are great and can propel an issue forward, but “it’s going to be by bringing together stakeholders that will make change” that the most substantial progress will be made. “What I’m talking about is broadening the coalition for openness in government. Not just journalists, they’ve always been bearing the load and carrying the weight of advocating for open government, but people like Black Lives Matter, people like environmentalists, who benefit from access to information, making open government their fight too.”

Frank LoMonte, director of the Brechner Center for Freedom of Information at the University of Florida, joins producer Michael O’Connell to take a look at the role public records play in advancing public policy and why this is an “opportune” moment for the general population to support journalists’ fight for transparency.

“I think when we first started, it would be generous to say we had any sort of social media strategy at all,” Ristow said. “When stories got posted online, it was often tied to the print deadline. We were trying to get it up on Facebook at some point, send a tweet. It was not really organized or strategic. Our first step was to set a schedule for Facebook so we could figure out what was working and what wasn’t.”

Things were a little “chaotic” at first, but they developed a schedule down to the half-hour, skipping some based on when their intended audience would most likely be online and looking for news.

“We looked at what content we wanted to share at that time, whether it’s a certain subject or a certain type, a native video or photo versus a link share. Once we established that schedule, we followed it religiously for a few months so we’d have data to actually look at to see how we’re doing,” she said.

The Journal Sentinel was in the midst of taking a fresh look at how it was incorporating its digital presence across the board, Ristow said. “We were paying attention to posting stories throughout the day on our website,” which included separating the digital posting from the print deadline.

“Oftentimes, those digital posting times weren’t coordinated at all with the social posting times,” Ristow said.

There’s now a point person on each shift who is responsible for scheduling and writing Facebook and Twitter posts for the paper’s flagship page, as it has the biggest audience and drives the most traffic to the paper’s website. This also helped to establish a consistent voice for the posts. Suggestions from reporters on which articles to post and the language to use on social media are provided through a dedicated Slack channel and have been helpful, she said.

Of course, when something breaks, it gets priority over the established schedule, but the digital staff also will find ways to supplement the initial post or story with other elements, including photos and video, throughout the day to keep coverage moving forward, Ristow says.

Emily Ristow, social media and mobile editor for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, joins producer Michael O’Connell to discuss the straightforward approach her team applied to expanding their social media reach, developing a strategy based on good old-fashioned research.

Andrea Hart is the co-founder along with Darryl Holliday, Bettina Chang and Harry Backlund, and director of community engagement at City Bureau, a non-profit local news organization based in Chicago’s South Side aimed at telling the city’s stories by people who live, work and study there.

Andrea Hart (Photo by Davon Clark)

“A lot of people are hungry for quality information but also really care about where they live and want to identify ways in which they can participate” in what’s going on in their city, their community and their neighborhood, she said. National politics can be difficult to figure out and it might seem pointless or overwhelming to try and make a difference on such a large level, but local news and information can help people feel good about engaging in the immediate world in which they live.

City Bureau, in the 3 years it’s been around, has tried to establish efforts not only to share local stories, but to engage people who live in the South and West Sides of Chicago, both as writers and as participants in making sure the stories that matter to communities are told.

City Bureau got its start when a group of media people, including Hart, started discussing the limitations of their respective jobs and the challenges of local news coverage. “Local news doesn’t get taken seriously enough. People don’t really have the on-ramps to journalism in the way you would think,” and in some locations across the city, quality coverage didn’t exist.

Now there’s a paid fellowship program lasting 10 weeks that happens three times a year, helping journalism students get real-world practice while working with professionals on projects that get published and shared. There are free training programs as part of the Documenters program, open to anyone with an interest in learning how to document public meetings or better keep tabs on the important issues in their neighborhood, sometimes providing that information to the fellows and City Bureau organizers to help bolster local coverage.

And City Bureau hosts a public newsroom every Thursday for two hours in the coffee shop attached to their offices, opening the doors to “identify issues of journalism and assets in the community. We’ve had a range of journalists presenting the work they’re trying to do. We had a woman who organizes block clubs on the South Side. She did a whole session on what does it look like, how do we organize them, what’s the potential there to try and leverage this local agency,” Hart said.

Now some of the block club’s members are receiving documentarian training to attend meetings and help provide information, she said. “We try to figure out what they need and what we can provide, how we can work together.”

Producer Michael O’Connell talks with Andrea Hart, co-founder and director of community engagement at City Bureau, about the importance of local coverage and an inventive way to bring better representation and authenticity to not only the stories being told but empowering the people telling them.

Depending on who’s talking, the homicide rate in the U.S. is either skyrocketing in some cities or has been brought under control. Obviously both can’t be true – or can they?

As part of a larger project looking at homicide rates in 50 cities across the country, and the rate at which those cases are closed, Washington Post database editors Steven Rich and Ted Mellnik set out to collect information on murders to see what patterns they could find.

Ted Mellnik and Steven Rich are database editor at The Washington Post.

Mellnik now has 50 different paper maps of municipalities on the walls near his desk. Some are “speckled,” while others have clear areas indicating a high rate of homicide and low rates of closure, or cities where most cases are solved or closed in some way.

“Government records have a lot to do with journalism,” Mellnik said. “It used to be, the business was going through filing cabinets and looking for reports and forms, but now all that’s kept on computers and databases. If you’re going to do reporting these days, in some kind of depth, a lot of times instead of asking for paper records, we’re asking for data files.”

That also means it’s crucial to be able to analyze those files and find the real nuggets of truth that indicate patterns and outliers. But requesting data from 50 different departments often meant getting data sets that could not be easily compared: they first had to develop a system in which information could be uniformly categorized and analyzed.

With this particular project into homicide events and closure rates, they wanted to take a deeper look not just into the cities they were studying, but where within those cities rates were going up and down and whether cases were being closed.

“A couple of years ago, a few of us did a rudimentary version of this in Chicago,” Rich said. “We mapped points to figure out which neighborhoods (homicides) were in and figured out which neighborhoods had the lowest arrest rates. We did a story about the neighborhoods in Chicago where murder was effectively legal because they were not arresting anybody for it. Out of that, the question sprang out: what would this look like in other cities?”

With a clearance rate of 20 percent, meaning killers are seldom brought to justice in Chicago. In other cities, like Richmond, Virginia, the closure rate is much higher.

They also looked at the racial disparity among both homicides and case closures, finding irregularities in some cities where certain parts have high closure rates while others, not too far away, have lower rates. “It’s the same city, the same police force, the same budget, the same detective,” Mellnik said.

They’re hoping people who take the time to review the maps will be able to fill in the gaps, identifying whether there’s a certain point in a neighborhood with a high homicide rate and low closure rate where “people with weapons tend to gather,” information that might not come from the data provided by police departments, Mellnik said.

Washington Post database editor Steven Rich and Ted Mellnik join producer Michael O’Connell to discuss their massive undertaking: requesting and analyzing homicide and case closure rates from 50 cities across the United States. They talk about the disparities that exist in a single city and how data reporting no longer requires looking through filing cabinets but, instead, requires the ability to read and interpret data files.

Learn How To Podcast

Turn Up the Volume equips journalism students, professionals, and others interested in producing audio content with the know-how necessary to launch a podcast for the first time. It addresses the unique challenges beginner podcasters face in producing professional level audio for online distribution. Beginners can learn how to handle the technical and conceptual challenges of launching, editing, and posting a podcast.

Help Support Our Podcast

Promoting good journalism is essential in a democracy. By donating to the It’s All Journalism Patreon page, you will help ensure that we continue producing the weekly podcast that focuses on good journalism. You’ll also help to boost us to the next level with live events and exclusive content. Donate here.